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5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
Ontologies are no longer stand-alone artifacts, but
they are linked through alignments in order to
support semantically enabled applications. Towards
this end, a new trend within the ontology field has
emerged: the network of aligned ontologies. The
appearance of networks of aligned ontologies is due
to the achievements of the ontology community
about ontologies and alignments reuse and evolution.
In this paper, we focused on (a) ontologies and
alignments as the constituent components of
networks of aligned ontologies, in order to obtain
knowledge representation within such settings, (b)
changes occurred in the ontology, alignment and
network level, in order to manage evolving
knowledge, and (c) suggesting a mathematical
formalization for achieving knowledge propagation,
in order to detect inconsistency within them. We
presented some challenges with insights on how to
approach them, thereby aiming to facilitate the
progress in the field.
As far as future research is concerned, we envisage
the direction of implementing algorithms based on
Category Theory, and especially on contravariant
representable functors, for representing, managing
and propagating knowledge within networks of
aligned ontologies. This will contribute in detecting
conceptual errors in order to revise the knowledge
emerging from the whole network.
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